Doubling Down on Skills-Based Hiring in Virginia

---

Issue Areas

---

Hiring the best and brightest, whether or not they have a college degree, is now standard in the Commonwealth of Virginia after Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed SB1014.  This bipartisan legislation ensures that college degree requirements will no longer be a barrier to hiring in public sector roles where skills assessments can be a better measure than a college degree.

For more than two years, Virginia has been working on removing degree requirements for public sector roles.. Youngkin first announced an Executive Order in May of 2023 that changed public hiring practices in the state. The following year, the Virginia legislature proposed codifying his order, but after a nearly unanimous House vote in favor, a partisan 10-5 Senate committee voted to stop it from advancing. This year, the prior sponsors, the Governor, and legislative leadership worked together to reassess and codify the rule.

In just four years, Governors in more than 27 states have taken executive action or signed legislation to remove degree requirements for their public sector jobs. Shifting to skills-based hiring for public sector employment is a policy that both Republican and Democratic Governors have been implementing across the country. While this issue is currently popular, with major publications singing its praises, some states are taking a longer-term approach and codifying their skills-based hiring requirements so that this issue doesn’t fall off the agenda as other topics take center stage. Virginia joins leaders in Florida and Georgia in passing legislation to ensure that skills-based hiring becomes a permanent part of the hiring process.

Thanks to this new legislation, a number of open roles that currently require candidates to have a degree can now be filled by skilled candidates with equivalent experience. Two examples of job postings on the Virginia State careers website that should no longer require a degree in the job posting are an Administrative Assistant, Office of Fellowships, and a Research Assistant at Virginia Tech. The Administrative Assistant is a great example of a role where the bachelor’s degree requirement could easily be replaced with an equivalent amount of training and experience. Similarly, the Research Assistant position also currently requires a bachelor’s degree but would be better suited for an individual with experience in lab management, project management skills, food composition analysis or something similar.

These two relevant job postings clearly demonstrate how tailored experience will make an individual more successful in the role versus having a generic bachelor’s degree. Members of the military are generally well suited for a number of these roles in the public sector, specifically in cyber security and IT, however tend to be excluded from these positions due to the fact that they chose to serve our nation over attending college. This new legislation will open up many job opportunities for skilled veterans to find meaningful employment upon leaving service.

The Commonwealth of Virginia currently has more than 4,791 open positions on the state careers portal. Thanks to Youngkin’s legislative action, a large portion of Virginia’s skilled workforce that is without a degree can now apply to these positions. Governor Youngkin recently announced that the state has been experiencing a period of “robust job growth.” This legislation will help Virginia to continue to open more opportunities for workers in the state.

Skills-based hiring is a federal priority as well. In 2020, President Trump signed Executive Order 13932 to remove unnecessary degree requirements from federal job postings. President Biden continued this work, clearing degree requirements from some 214 federal job categories now available for skilled workers without degrees. Skills-Based Hiring was also listed as a priority during the presidential campaign for Kamala Harris. This bipartisan reform is widely understood to be beneficial for all individuals, no matter their political beliefs. Removing degree requirements and moving towards skills-based hiring can provide millions of individuals with meaningful career opportunities. Rather than hiring an individual because of a generic degree, employers can instead hire individuals whose skills are better aligned for the position. While this change does require hiring managers and employees to participate in upfront skills identification, assessment and, in some cases, training, it will lead to hiring more qualified individuals. Gov. Youngkin and the State of Virginia have shown that they are up to the challenge and ready to create more opportunities for their workforce.